Zachary surgery

Well, Zach ended up having surgery on Sunday instead of Monday morning. He was getting sick & his labs were bad. Good thing they did it, if they would have waited his intestines probably would have perforated. They took out the meconium that was blocking his intestine & found two microperforations that had somehow sealed themselves. They both had scar tissue on them so we are not sure when they happened. He now has two stomas at the end of his incision. He had a pretty rough night on Sunday (me too!), but by Monday at 11:00 he was off of his pressors & had peed out a bunch of fluid. He got another blood transfusion last night & had some pain control issues, but they added a higher dose of morphine. He had a restful night & looked pretty good today.

He started opening his eyes & looking around. This is really the first time that he has done that. I was getting worried as I know his eyes weren't fused anymore & he is 30 weeks today. The nurse thinks that he just finally feels better with that stomach pressure relieved.

Now they will just wean his vent hoping to extubate soon & wait for his intestines to start working.

It was a wild roller coaster ride so far this week, it is nice to be able to "relax" a bit. Thank you everyone for all of your good thoughts & prayers.

i am glad the surgery went well and that he seems to be feeling better. hope he recovers quickly :) i am so thankful they decided to go ahead and do surgery so a bad situation didn't become worse. Thinking and praying about you and your little boy.

I know exactly how you feel, I went though all this in December, except Caden had perforated. A roller coaster ride to say the least! I'm glad your son is looking rested and opening his eyes! Good luck through all this, you'll all be just fine!

Thanks for checking in with me. I have been pretty tired dealing with all of this by myself. My boyfriend has been gone for 2 weeks now with another week to go (of course then he'll be jet lagged when he gets back, so not much help then either).

Zach is the "rockstar"of Nursery A. He is the most stable baby in the "sick baby" section. He extubated himself 4 days after surgery, spent 1 1/2 days on CPAP & then has been on nasal cannula since. He has some episodes of brady & desats, but not too many. He continues to have low sodium & when they try to increase his sodium, he starts retaining fluid. I have been holding him about 2 hours a day, every day. He will be 6 weeks old tomorrow & 32 weeks adjusted on Tues. He has been getting breast milk via feeding tube & they have been able to increase that every day also. he is up to a grand 5 ml every 3 hours! He has a small amount of output from his stoma, but active bowel sounds.

I try not to worry about the next things on the "list", like the paleness around his optic nerves which might be "normal" because his dad & I are both white, or might be bad (I have no idea why they bother telling me things like this). Also, the GI issue may have been a fluke occurrence, but might be a rare form of cystic fibrosis that affects the GI system. They will test him for that when he is older.

I have also been dealing with severe milk duct blockages. I can't seem to have more than 2 days without a new blockage & the pain can be ridiculous. I do everything the lactation consultants recommend, but no improvement yet.